“Well, we are still together, my kultanen, are we not? Even now. Even as the polar ice caps melt and flood our world. What’s that famous line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? From the last ballet I saw you perform? ‘Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.’ ” His voice catches. “We aren’t really parting, are we, my kultanen? Just saying good night until the morrow. That is what I shall whisper on board the Kalevala, as we get closer and closer to you and this place, New North. Too good to be true, I think. An oasis, like from a myth. But I’ll try to believe. I have to. Until then, my kultanen, good night, good night, good night.”
He touches the screen and it darkens. “I don’t think I could stand another tick,” I admit. “Thank the Gods that screen is black.” I feel heartbroken and numb and angry and guilty all at once. Guilty because I’m glad it’s over. And heartbroken because I feel more bound to Elizabet than ever. Robert offered her what Lukas offered me: the promise that he would believe. For different reasons, obviously, but the word is aflame again. Believe.
Even Lukas seems moved. “It’s too hard, knowing what we know about them.”
I shake my head, doubt gnawing away at my thoughts. “Elizabet isn’t really the same person I wrote about in the Chronicle, is she? She loved to dance, and she made huge sacrifices to do it. She wasn’t forced. Dancing wasn’t the tawdry spectacle that we were taught about in School.”
I look at Lukas. He lowers his eyes.
“No, she’s not the Elizabet from the Chronicle,” he concedes.
“She seems ambitious—even a little ruthless. I mean, she abandoned her boyfriend and her family—defied her family’s wishes, even. For her own dream.” I pause; the words are hard to form and to speak. “It makes me wonder whether I understand any part of the pre-Healing history at all.”
Privately, I laud her strength. I wonder if it was common in pre-Healing women. Maybe they were tough and didn’t need the protection of Gallants.
“The Golden Age,” Lukas says quietly.
I frown at him. What do you mean?”
“The period of history, the one that the Aerie rulers say they used as inspiration for their own—”
“I know what the Golden Age is,” I whisper, cutting him off.
Lukas starts tapping away at those rectangular keys. “Take a look at this. Elizabet’s computer stored a bunch of books.” He points to the screen. “One of them is called Life in a Medieval Village in the Golden Age.”
I squint at a gorgeously vibrant painting, filled with images that are not unlike the Aerie: stone walls of a distant Keep, men and women in plain robes. The huts that dominate the foreground seem more like Lukas’s village, however.
“I think it’s a Schoolbook of some sort,” he continues. “Maybe Elizabet was still doing some studies. She looks young enough to still be in School.”
“She was eighteen.” I say quietly. “Exactly my age.”
Lukas clicks and words appear. Shoulders touching, we draw close. He touches the screen, whirling me to particular passages. The language is dense and dry, but I get it in a tick, a heartbeat. Talk of hunger, of servitude, of ignorance. Everything of value concentrated in the hands of a few. This was no Golden Age. So why does The Lex paint it that way? New North is better than this. Everyone—Boundary and Aerie—has adequate food, clothing, and shelter. It almost seems as if the Founders of New North built a society that’s like my Chronicle of Elizabet. On the outside, it could appear to be true. But there is no real truth.
After about a bell, my head is spinning. “Lukas.” My voice shakes. “I don’t know what is real anymore.”
“That’s how Eamon felt, too,” he answers, keeping his eyes fixed to words on the glowing screen.
I grab his shoulder. “Eamon knew about all this?”
“Yes, he’d learned something of the gap between now and the real past. But, Eva,” Lukas breaks his gaze from the computer and clasps his hand on mine. “I don’t want you to end up like Eamon.”
Panic takes hold. I crane my neck, looking for his grandmother. Where is she? As odd and confusing as she is, I want her here; I want to be rescued from the news I sense Lukas is about to give me. Maybe she got out of the way for this very reason.
I try to wriggle out of his grasp. “What do you mean ‘end up like Eamon’? Seeing this stuff doesn’t mean I’ll go careening down the side of the Ring. One has nothing to do with the other.”
He is insistent that we hold hands; he takes the other. “Eva, they have everything to do with one another. Eamon knew that The Lex was a fiction. That everything you were raised to believe was a fiction.”
I gasp at the word. “A fiction?”
Lukas’s voice is firm. “Yes. Eamon discovered something very dangerous. He learned that the story of the Healing was the same as an old, banned story about a flood that wiped clean the past. That story was in a book called the Bible. And people like Robert and Elizabet believed in the Bible as you believe in The Lex.”
Bible. Haven’t I just heard that word?
Lukas continues. “The Bible was kind of like a pre-Healing Lex. For some people, at least. Elizabet was holding a copy of the Bible in her hands during her last post. She mentioned praying with it, when she was hoping for a post from Robert.”
“Is the Bible about Apple? Do you have a copy?” The questions tumble out of my mouth. Even in my bewilderment, it’s as if my appetite for truth has just been whet, and I am starving for answers.
He seems annoyed, or maybe just tired. He sighs. “No, we don’t have a copy. And it’s not about Apple. Tech came long after the Bible. Anyway, all Bibles were destroyed. We out here in the Boundary lands have never forgotten it, though.”
“How do you know that?”
“We pass down the past word by word, Eva. So my people have kept our own record of what happened here in New North before and after the Healing. And we remember when the Bibles were destroyed.”
“Why would the Founders have destroyed those books? Paper is precious.”
He lets go of my hands. He no longer sounds tired; he sounds angry. “Because the Founders needed to write a fiction. So they took the parts of the Bible that worked and fashioned The Lex out of them.”
I’m angry, too. “That’s heresy, Lukas. The Lex is a sacred work, delivered directly to the people of New North by the Gods.”
“And everything that you’ve been taught has turned out to be true, right?” he snaps back.
I don’t answer. How can I? This one trip to the Boundary lands has burned every single one of my long-held beliefs. About the Aerie, the pre-Healing days, the Healing itself, The Lex … and now my own twin.
Lukas speaks to my silence. “Please look at this, Eva.” He taps on the computer again and pulls up another book that Elizabet stored on it. “I might not have a copy of the Bible, but Elizabet did. Here it is, on her computer.”
I push him to the side. Neither one of us wants him to spoon-feed me information anymore. I want to make my own decisions about Elizabet, the Healing, New North, and Eamon. No longer do I want to view the present or the past through anyone else’s prism. Imitating Lukas’s motions, I page through this … Bible. The words and rhythm remind me of The Lex. The language that is at once beautiful and obtuse.
His hand jerks out to stop me at a passage.
I read the words over and over to myself, until I realize that I need to speak them aloud. “In the eyes of God, the Earth was corrupt and full of lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt man had become, God said, “I will wipe out from the Earth mankind whom I have created, and not only mankind, but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air.” Then God said to Noah, ‘Make yourself an ark … Go into the ark, you and all your household, for you and you alone in this age have I found to be truly just and chosen … I will bring rain down on the Earth for forty days and forty nights, and so I will wipe out from the surface of the earth every moving crea
ture that I have made…’ ”
I grow quiet. Lukas doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to. We both know just how much “The Story of Noah”—a tale from pre-Healing times, from pre Golden-Age times—reads like the creation story in The Lex, supposedly divined to the Founders only two hundred and fifty years ago.
As if to comfort me, Lukas offers, “My people—who were once called the Inuit—have a flood myth, too. Perhaps all people do.”
“Do you mean the story of the Mariner?” Nurse Aga had told me the tale of the Mariner, who survived a great flood that covered the Earth but for a tall, icy mountain by making a raft. But I never connected that story with our history in The Lex.
“Where did you hear that?” Lukas looks alarmed.
“From my Nurse Aga. Before she became so old—so dotty, my parents called it—that she had to come back to the Boundary lands.”
“That’s what your parents told you about this woman?”
“Yes.” I don’t like how Lukas refers to Nurse Aga. I’m afraid to find out more; I don’t think I can handle it right now if something awful happened to her. So instead, I ask, “How do you know all this, Lukas? You sound like a Teacher.”
“We all would to you. Our memories are long. We remember well the times before the Healing.”
“But how did Eamon learn about it? Did you tell him?”
“No, I didn’t tell him. Do you remember when he spent all that time in the Archives, studying past Testing?”
“Of course. We fought about that.”
“He had come across a journal from a past Testor. The journal was over one hundred and fifty years old, and it contained references to the Bible and the Noah story. It seems that our people aren’t the only ones who remembered.”
“And he told you about what he found?” The manner of Eamon’s epiphany is coming clearer. But why did he tell Lukas instead of me? To protect me? Or because he didn’t trust me, as I was just a Maiden and unequipped to handle the truth?
Lukas studies my face as realization after realization dawns. “And I shared with him what I knew. What my people know.”
Confusion melts away, like ice floes in the sun. I know now why he was so scared, so intent on his training. But one huge block remains. “I still don’t get what this has to do with Eamon’s death.”
“Eva, Eamon wanted to win the Archon spot to uncover the full truth about New North. But someone found out about Eamon’s knowledge and his intentions. So, before he could become the Archon and change everything, he was killed.”
I shake my head. This is impossible. Eamon was alone out there. “Who?”
“We don’t know. Our best guess is someone in the Aerie did it, someone with a lot to lose if Eamon became the Archon. But that could be so many different people. Or one of many different factions.”
“Like?”
“Well, the Triad—or one of their minions—is an obvious choice. But they could have been oblivious to Eamon’s work, and it could easily be one of their lesser cogs who had a lot at stake if Eamon really changed the rules of the Aerie. Or it could be one of the other Testors.”
Faces and names flash through my mind. The Triad? There is no way my father could have been involved in such an act, no matter the consequences. Unless some rogue member had the foresight to set me up to be the Archon because he believed I’d be a malleable Maiden? What about the Testors? Aleksandr, Neils, the others? Murder seems beyond their small selves, but it’s possible. Jasper? No, that’s ridiculous.
What about someone like Scout Okpik, who looked Boundary-born but benefitted so much from the Aerie ways? It would certainly explain his behavior toward me. He needed to make sure that I didn’t stand a chance of winning, just in case I knew what Eamon knew, and he became uninterested in me once he believed I no longer had a shot.
I feel sick. I start to retch and run out the front door. Lukas races out after me and holds back my hair as I empty the meager contents of my stomach in a snow bank just outside.
Once my breathing has evened, Lukas leads me back inside. He settles me onto a chair and moves to the kitchen. When he returns, he has a cup of steaming tea with him. I’m guessing his aanak prepared it for me. Has she been listening to our conversation? I bet she knows everything that Lukas has told me. Even before he said it aloud.
As he sits down in the other chair, Lukas opens his mouth. Then he closes it and takes a moment. “We of the Boundary have always suspected the same things that Eamon learned, but we’ve never known the full truth about the Healing and the state of our Earth. Only someone on the inside—someone with access to the information that the Triad has hidden away—could do that. Eamon wanted to be that person. I’m not talking about Chief Archon. I’m talking about someone who could bridge the many worlds with the truth.”
Now I see where he’s going. Why he brought me out here. It wasn’t simply to show me the secrets of Elizabet Laine. “He would have become the Angakkuq. He was the one your people have been waiting for. Like your aanak wants?” I ask.
“I guess so, Eva,” he says.
I whisper, mostly to myself. “So this is what Eamon meant. ‘Will they still love me when I do what I must?’ ”
Lukas stares hard at me over the steaming tea. “What did you say to him when he asked that question?”
For some reason, I don’t want to tell Lukas about the journal entries. Instead, I create a fiction. Why shouldn’t I? “Just that I would love him no matter what. But I am the Archon now. I will find out the truth—just like Eamon would have done.”
“No, Eva. I don’t think you should. It’s too dangerous, and they’d be watching you. After what happened with Eamon.”
I’m surprised. I was expecting Lukas to summon his aanak. To tell me what I could do in Eamon’s place.
Lukas’s voice grows urgent. “Why not stay here, disappear into the Boundary lands with me? We have ways of hiding people. If you really feel you have to continue Eamon’s legacy, why not undertake it more safely, from this side of the Ring? With me helping you?”
I draw back. “Why would you have encouraged me to come to the Boundary lands and hear Elizabet’s story unless you wanted me to learn the truth? Unless you wanted me to become the Angakkuq?”
Lukas shakes his head. “Maybe part of me wanted that, Eva. At the start. But now that you’re here, and now that I stare into your eyes, I don’t want you to become an Archon or the Angakkuq.” He lunges for me and grabs my shoulders, so forcefully that it hurts. “Do you really want to end up like your brother? Please don’t do this to me.”
“It has nothing to do with you, Lukas.”
“Are you blind? Can’t you see how I feel about you?”
I stare into his dark eyes, and see more truths. Maybe they were always there. Maybe I overlooked underneath Lukas’s stoicism. Maybe I’ve suppressed them in myself too. The Maiden in me—so trained in the ways of modesty—tries to convince me to lower my gaze and play dumb. But I fight her, and answer honestly, “I think I do, Lukas.”
“Do you share my feelings at all? I know it’s forbidden by your precious Lex, but even just a hint of—”
I press my finger to his lips. I think I do share his feelings—at least, a little—but we can’t think about them. Besides, I need time with my feelings. And I don’t have time. So I say, “How can I possibly act on that now?”
He kisses my finger and lets it go. “So where does that leave us?”
I say the answer he already knows. “I must fulfill Eamon’s destiny.”
I allow myself a single, final indulgence. As Lukas and I hurry back through the Boundary lands and into the centuries-old tunnel through the Ring, I hold his hand. And I permit myself to fantasize about a life I will never have. An honest life with Lukas.
Before I squeeze through the narrow part of the passage, Lukas and I pause for an awkward moment to say our farewells. Will I ever see him again? He will be re-assigned to the Aerie, and there our paths might cross as Maiden and Att
endant or Archon and Attendant, depending on when and where we meet. But it will never be the same as this moment. We will never have this freedom again, alone with our truths.
Lukas answers my unspoken question. “I’ll never really leave you, Eva. Even when you don’t see me, I’ll be watching over you.”
“Just like you did during the Testing?”
He smiles. “Much the same way. I’ll find a way to keep tabs on what you’re doing. My people are everywhere and nowhere. You know that now. And I’ll find a way to protect you—even get you out of the Aerie if need be—if you really insist on moving forward with Eamon’s mission.”
“I’d like that, Lukas. It would make me feel less alone.”
“You’ll never be alone, Eva. I promise you.”
I don’t want this moment to end, but I’m starting to get scared. Daylight is coming soon, and with it, the distinct possibility of discovery. I must make my way back to the Aerie and into my warm, downy bed before I’m found out. Or I’ll never get to start my work as the Angakkuq, as Archon, as Eamon’s successor. I release his hand. “Take good care of Elizabet’s Relic, Lukas.”
“I will, Eva. Remember what I told you about where to look for information. Look for Tech and the old stories; the truth will lie there. Remember what I taught you about not getting caught. And … believe.”
“I will. Goodbye, Lukas.”
He grabs my hand one last time. “What was it Robert said to Elizabet? ‘I shall say good night till it be morrow.’ Good night, Eva.”
I break away from him before I start crying.
WHEN THE ICE WALLS narrow and squeeze down tightly on my chest, I welcome the sensation. It forces me to think about something other than the revelations of this night. I finally push through the gap and out into the crisp night air, gasping for breath. And happy about the distraction. When I look up—and around—I freeze. I’m not alone.
Relic (The, Books of Eva I) Page 18